25 May 2014

25th of May

Farm news
At the moment we're winding down the ClimatePrediction ANZ work units. I have two machines left with work to complete and we can't get any more. In the mean time I have allocated the other 3 Intel GPU machines to running Seti.

Parallella news
Carrying on from my last post one of the Parallella's is off and running. They are about 1/3rd faster than the Pi's when running on the ARM. They can also do 2 work units at the same time. Unfortunately nobody has managed to get the Epiphany co-processor to do any work yet. There is a bet between one of the Einstein developers and Andreas Olofsson (CEO of Adapteva) over getting the Epiphany to do a 3*2^22 real to complex FFT in single precision faster than the raspberry Pi's GPU. The deadline is the 15th of September.

I updated the Parallella image from Linux 14.01 to 14.04 (Trusty). That took around 4 to 5 hours to complete. This also got BOINC updated to 7.2.42

The Parallella, like the Raspberry Pi, doesn't have a battery backed real-time clock. As you would have seen from my last blog post it sets the clock some time after booting up. To work around this I had to install fake-hwclock and ntp. The fake-hwclock stores the date/time when shutting down and gets it when starting up. The ntp runs as a daemon and corrects the clock from an ntp server. By default Ubuntu doesn't install ntp, but has one called ntpdate which only runs (delayed) at start up. Commands to do the above:sudo apt-get install fake-hwclocksudo apt-get install ntpsuto apt-get remove ntpdate

Pi news
Over the last fortnight I was running the 3.12.19+ kernel on one of the Pi's. The other guys running it have been reporting random crashes. Well it did the same to me with two crashes over a 24 hour period. Apparently the only error messages are output on HDMI so unless you logged in locally and turned the screen saver off you can't see them. It doesn't log much so even then there is very little information to report to the developers.

After the 2nd crash I went back to the "release" kernel (ie 3.10) which works fine.